A blog about search, search skills, teaching search, learning how to search, learning how to use Google effectively, learning how to do research. It also covers a good deal of sensemaking and information foraging.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

If you're like me, you probably read Moby Dick at some point in your life. Maybe in high school, maybe for general reading later on in life. Regardless of when you read it, you probably have a pretty good mental image of the story, right? Captain Ahab and the search for the great white whale... maybe something about the inherent qualities of mankind, some ideas about man vs. nature, madness and a bunch of characters, the likes of which would never enter a Starbucks, but would prefer their grog on the open sea.

Whenever it was that you read Moby Dick, how much of it did you understand? Let's test your level of understanding: You know what a right-whale is, you probably remember the difference between a top-sail and a stun-sail, and you remember the characters of Starbuck, Queequeg and Ishmael, right?

It's been years since I've read Moby Dick and couldn't remember how to spell Pequod (in my head I had two e's). So first step for me was to search for captain ahab's ship. Pequod popped up and then another google search for pequod upper deck. That brought up a lot of Upper Deck baseball card hits. Changed my search to simply pequod. And the Wikipedia link came up on top.

In the description section this appears "she has been ornately decorated, even to the whale teeth set into the railing that now resemble an open jaw."

Chapter 16: She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the Sperm Whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe.